People's Action Party

The People's Action Party (PAP) is a conservative party in Singapore that was founded on 21 November 1954 by Lee Kuan Yew. The party was founded as a democratic socialist party, with Lee being involved in labor and trade union concerns. The party had a traditionalist Leninist party organization and a vanguard cadre from its labor-leaning faction during its early years. The party was initially allied to the communists, but Lee, amazed by how Hong Kong workers managed their wages in times of economic booms or recessions, decided to reverse course on the welfare policies that his party had inherited or copied from the Labour Party. During the early 1960s, the PAP Executive expelled the leftists from the party, and the party moved further to the right in the late 1960s. In 1976, his party left the Socialist International after the Dutch Labor Party attempted to expel it, claiming that the PAP clamped down on free speech.

The PAP was credited with being central to the city-state's rapid political, social, and economic development, but it was also criticized for its authoritarianism. The party sought to institutionalize Asian values, reject liberal democracy, and accept the need for pragmatic economic interventionism and general Keynesian economics. Since the 1980s, a meritocracy was implemented in civil society at the same time as the implementation of free-market policies.